GIANTS, HORNED SKULLS, AND THE WEIRDNESS OF THE NIAGARA REGION. WERE THERE GIANTS LIVING AT NIAGARA FALLS?
A Fun Story With a Reality Check
Every region has its weird stories.
Down South it’s swamp monsters.
In the desert it’s UFOs.
In Western New York?
Apparently we’ve got giants.
If you read older local books and websites, you start seeing the same wild claims pop up:
An eight-foot skeleton dug out of a mound near Wellsville, NY in 1886.
A burial mound at Ellisburg, PA (just over the border) with another gigantic skeleton.
A mound near Sayre, Pennsylvania full of men seven feet tall with horns growing out of their skulls.
All of it supposedly shipped off to something called the American Investigating Museum… which then, of course, loses everything.
It’s like an entire season of the X-Files happened along the New York–Pennsylvania line and nobody told us.
So: is any of this real?
Let’s chase the footnotes.
Step One: Where Are These Stories Coming From?
When you trace the giant talk backward, a pattern shows up fast.
Modern “mysteries” websites and blogs
Sites that round up “Giants of New York State” or “Lost Giants of the Erie Canal” repeat a nearly identical paragraph: giants in Western New York, a bestial hominid in the Southwest, then two cases “just outside the Western Door.” They specifically name Wellsville and Ellisburg, PA, and they credit a 1978 book called Weird America by Jim Brandon.
Jim Brandon – Weird America (1978)
Brandon’s book is a cult classic of “Fortean” weirdness—part travel guide, part paranormal scrapbook, not an academic text. He lists the Ellisburg/Wellsville story: a burial mound torn up in 1886 that supposedly contained an eight-foot skeleton. A BuffaloRising feature on “lost giants” in WNY basically retells Brandon’s summary, again without giving a specific 1886 newspaper or excavation report.
Jess Stearn / Brad Steiger – Montezuma’s Serpent
Some of the same sites quote a book called Montezuma’s Serpent & Other True Supernatural Tales of the Southwest. It’s a paranormal anthology that mentions giant, almost animal-like hominids in the American Southwest—again, speculative and very much in the “spooky paperback at the bus station” category, not mainstream archaeology.
So far, we’ve gone from:
“They definitely found giants in Western New York”
down to:
“A 1970s weird-phenomena writer said he read about an eight-foot skeleton once.”
Which is fun! But not exactly rock-solid.
Step Two: What About the “Horned Giants” of Sayre?
This is the most dramatic claim:
giant men, around seven feet tall, with horns above their eyebrows, unearthed in a burial mound near Sayre, PA, then mysteriously lost on the way to that same American Investigating Museum.
Here’s what source-checking turns up:
The story is now widely labeled an urban legend. The Wikipedia entry for Sayre flat-out calls it that, and notes that the three archaeologists the legend cites—G.P. Donehoo, A.B. Skinner, and W.K. Moorehead—never mentioned horned or giant skeletons in their actual excavation reports.
The Peabody Museum (where Moorehead later worked) has a blog post digging into the claim. They looked at Moorehead’s notes and publications about the Tioga Point/Sayre excavations. They found burials, yes—but no horns, no extraordinary heights. The “seven-foot horned giants” appear to be a later exaggeration grafted onto ordinary archaeological work.
So on the horned-giant front, the fact-check verdict is pretty blunt:
Cool story, almost certainly not true.
Step Three: Do Any Giants Survive Scrutiny?
Short answer: not really.
Giant-skeleton claims show up all over 19th- and early-20th-century America. They’re so common that there’s a whole literature on them. Modern reviews call most of them hoaxes, mismeasurements, or misidentified animal bones, often amplified by newspapers looking for sensational copy.
In the specific Wellsville / Ellisburg cases, I couldn’t find a solid academic paper, excavation report, or museum catalog with measurements and photos. What we seem to have is a chain of “so-and-so once wrote that someone else found an eight-footer”—which is several steps removed from verifiable evidence.
That doesn’t mean nothing interesting was ever dug up here. Western New York and northern Pennsylvania are loaded with real Indigenous mound sites and burials. But so far, when specialists look for those towering skeletons with Lovecraftian skulls, the paper trail falls apart.
Okay, So How Do We Talk About This Honestly and Have Fun?
Here’s the version that passes both the “this is entertaining” test and the “I can say this with a straight face” test:
In the late 1800s, newspapers and local histories across the U.S.—including Western New York and Pennsylvania—published stories about unusually large skeletons found in burial mounds. Decades later, 1970s paranormal writers like Jim Brandon picked up those tales and repackaged them as evidence of “lost giants” near places like Wellsville and Ellisburg. A related legend from Sayre, PA claims archaeologists unearthed seven-foot skeletons with horned skulls, but modern checks of the original archaeologists’ reports show no such finds, and historians now treat the Sayre giants as an urban legend. Today, these stories survive more as folklore and Fortean fun than as accepted archaeology.
Or, in normal language:
Western New York might not have had a secret NBA-ready race of horned giants…
but it definitely has some great giant stories.
Why I Still Love These Stories
Even when the fact-check comes back “ehh, probably not,” the legends tell us something real:
People here used to expect the land to surprise them.
Farmers were turning up skulls and artifacts often enough that the line between science, rumor, and myth got blurry.
A century later, we’re still talking about it.
And honestly? I kind of like living in a place where you can drive past some anonymous hill and think:
“Is that just a hill…
or the former address of an eight-foot guy with horns?”
The evidence says “just a hill.”
The folklore says, “maybe check twice.”
And that tension—that little gap between what we can prove and what we can imagine—is where the fun lives.
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